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Aaron Goldberg, Larry Grenadier and Eric Harland
are grooving gracefully on piano, bass and drums.
Persian rugs with repeating patterns surround the
stage and line the walls, hugging the music tightly.
People are starting to sign the mailing list that is being
passed around, and Grenadier grins when the tune
finishes and the crowd erupts.

The next song starts out with a soft piano intro.
While Goldberg finds his way around the keys, he is
accompanied by the sound of billiard balls colliding
and several people shouting. This jazz club doubles as
a pool hall.

Aaron Goldberg, Larry Grenadier and Eric Harland
are grooving gracefully on piano, bass and drums.
Persian rugs with repeating patterns surround the
stage and line the walls, hugging the music tightly.
People are starting to sign the mailing list that is being
passed around, and Grenadier grins when the tune
finishes and the crowd erupts.

The next song starts out with a soft piano intro.
While Goldberg finds his way around the keys, he is
accompanied by the sound of billiard balls colliding
and several people shouting. This jazz club doubles as
a pool hall.

Mitch Borden, formerly the owner of the
inimitable Smalls (1994-2003), started to present music
at Fat Cat three years ago. But now that Smalls has
shut its doors for good, Borden is spending all of his
time trying to make Fat Cat work as a replacement.
The going is tough, though, as limitations abound.
First and foremost is sound. Fat Cat's current
music room is long and narrow. In the front are rows
of chairs, but as you move toward the back, the room
becomes more of a lounge to make up for the distance
from the stage. There are couches in the lounge area,
some of which do not even face the stage, and while
the sound in the back is audible, it is not as immersive
as in the front. I use a sound system, says Borden,
but at the bare minimum level, not to create volume,
but just to create a sound in the room so that it's at a
level where jazz should be heard.

Borden has exacting acoustic standards, and he is
relentless about working with it hands on. He talks
about some of the larger clubs in New York
disdainfully, saying that A lot of the guys with the big
sound systems, they actually change jazz and make it
into like rock and roll, because they just mic the heck
out of everything. And that's not the way jazz should
be. I've heard great players and they've got a huge
sound system, and it's like 'Where's the
saxophone coming from?' I like it coming from the
player.

With Smalls, Borden had a small room with ideal
acoustics. One of the reasons musicians liked it so
much was that its size, its rugs and its curtain made for
an intimate experience where the musicians could
connect with the audience on a personal level. Borden
says that, I've been told that Smalls was so good,
because it was so small and the acoustics were so
incredible, that it made bad players sound good.
At Fat Cat, he has the pool tables to contend with,
as the music room is divided from the pool hall with
temporary walls. Borden would like to rebuild the
walls and sound proof them, but that depends on
money that he does not have right now. Also, there has
been tension between pool players and concertgoers
over the jukebox that Fat Cat shuts off when the
musicians are playing. If the room is sound proofed,
that will no longer pose a problem.

Another of Fat Cat's limitations is that Borden can
only keep the club open as long as the pool hall is
open, and can only present music four nights a week.
For a normal jazz club, staying open until 4 am on
weekends can be more than adequate, but Smalls did
not have a liquor license (patrons could bring their
own, which led, Borden says, to a lot of vomiting),
and so it often stayed open until 8, 9 or 10am. With all
of that time to jam, a tight musical community
developed, and now they're all waiting for their gigs
back. There are 18 bands with no place to play,
Borden laments.

If Borden gets the money he is hoping for, he will
pour it into Fat Cat. (He does not plan to open a new
club, although he is happy to let someone use the
Smalls name.) In addition to sound-proofing, he will
also build a back room for this community of
musicians to hang out. Drummer Billy Kaye says that
there has never been anything like the back room at
Smalls, and director of Smalls Records, Luke Kaven
says that the back room at Smalls was the hub of the
New York jazz world. If you sat there night after night,
you could watch the world revolve around you.

In the meantime, musicians keep stopping by Fat
Cat. They hang out just outside the music room, and
they greet Borden, who watches everyone carefully,
directing a call of music, music, music to anyone he
thinks is there to see music rather than play pool. It is
not the same as owning a club, but Borden says he
could get used to it. Now my bills are just living
expenses because I'm not an owner anymore. I don't
have rent, I don't have insurance, I don't have
electricity, the phone, the lawsuits.

And musicians are doing their part to get jazz at
the Fat Cat off the ground. June saw Jimmy Cobb, Kurt
Rosenwinkel, Jason Lindner, Mark Turner and even
Brad Mehldau make appearances. Just be sure not to
call Fat Cat's main phone number, because they have a
bad habit of yelling at people who call to ask about the
music. There are growing pains still, but the place has
potential.

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